


she sang to me a language strange

by anthrop



Series: Good Intentions Deadfic Extravaganza [5]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Animal Transformation, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Chimera Edward Elric, Chimeras, Death, Gen, Human Experimentation, Imprisonment, Loss of Control, Loss of Identity, Mind Manipulation, Torture, Unreliable Narrator, look SSoM gave us tactical werewolves and i lost my whole goddamn mind about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:00:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24384718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: Ed buries his head in his good shoulder and tries to do anything but think.
Series: Good Intentions Deadfic Extravaganza [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983268
Comments: 34
Kudos: 124
Collections: Body Horror for the Changelings, Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Background on this: I needed to fluff a NaNo word count a couple years back so I went off the rails on some scenes for a WIP I've been fondly calling _POLITICAL INTRIGUE AND WEREWOLVES_ while not actually writing very much of it down then or since. But! I've been wanting to go ham on a chimera!Ed fic since 2006 and it's gonna be a million years before I finish all my other projects and have a chance to. I found this in my abandoned fics folder, realized I was still pretty dang pleased with it, cleaned it up, and here we are.
> 
> Actual background on this: So you know how Sacred Star of Milos is, arguably, a thing? You do not need to have seen SSoM, you just need to know that Creta's out there making werewolves and that is COOL AS HELL. Ed in this fic was captured by Creta for the purpose of being interrogated for information regarding Amestris in general, the military, his connections to the military, alchemy, what the deal is on clapping alchemy, etc. When he wasn't forthcoming they decided fuck it, Grumman's stepping down real soon and we hate Armstrong AND Mustang, time for werewolves. Ed's not had a good year. :(
> 
> Oh, also I continue to make Creta vaguely France-adjacent simply because it delights me to imagine Ed speaking French. There's bad Google Translate French in here. Sorry.
> 
> Shoutout to Sevlow's chimera!Hughes fic [Primal Instincts](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5281306/1/Primal-Instincts) for being enormously influential on this. Also, the title comes from a song on Crywolf's album _widow [OBLIVIØN Pt. I]._

Ed falls down.

Again.

He keeps doing that. Falling. It doesn't hurt. Or—it does, but not as much as he thinks it should.

He's cold. Numb from the shoulders and hips down. Shaking all over. He's so fucking _cold._

_Is_ he cold? 

He _thinks_ he’s cold. Or he was. Or he was sick and shaking before this, and maybe he's still sick enough still to be shaking now. Shaking isn't trembling. Cold and fear are not mutually exclusive.

He doesn't know. It’s all grown so blurred.

There are some things that are certain, and final, and inescapable. Cold concrete floors roughened by deep claw marks that bite at his feet. Cold concrete walls marred by deep claw marks as high as he can reach. Higher than that, much higher. Higher than he can hope to reach on his hind legs—

_—no._

His two legs. It's two legs. He's got two legs and he's always had two legs.

...Hasn't he? Always had two legs?

No. No, that's all wrong. It's wrong. He's wrong. He feels so wrong. What the fuck is wrong with him?

Half his life. He's gone more than half his life with just the one leg. The leg he was born with—

—the right one, yes, he's always had the right leg—

—and the left….

The left, he's not so sure.

No. No, he _is_ sure. He's sure he's never had two legs—

No.

No, wait. He _knows_ this.

He's mostly always had two legs, except when he didn't, and that was because Winry was—

No, shut up, don't think about her, _idiot,_ don't, she's in danger, she's going to die, it'll be a mercy if all they do is kill her so don't even dare _think_ about her—

His mechanic. 

Yeah. 

He didn’t have two legs when _his mechanic_ was working on one of them. Working on it, because he's got automail. Had automail once, and gone now. He had an automail leg. 

He had automail elsewhere too, didn't he? Before? His arm. The right one? Wasn't it automail? 

Yeah. Yeah, that's right, he used to have two automail limbs, a long time ago now. He's only had the one—the one returned, the one still automail—for years now. He doesn't have an automail arm anymore because—

—no names, no names, don't give these fucks _anything—_

—because he got his right arm back.

Right? 

Right.

And—and he got his leg back too, which is why he doesn't have automail at all anymore—right?

No no no _nononono,_ god, please, _no,_ that's not right either. 

This leg. 

_This leg._

It's not his. This leg _isn't his._ He lost his leg—

(white space, white teeth, white grin, _you beat me)_

—a long time ago. That was a long time ago. He was a different man back then. Not a man, not yet. Just a boy who had to grow up too quickly. That was then. He's a man now, and he's got all his limbs again—

—except the leg.

This leg—

_This isn't his leg._

They cut this _thing_ off some corpse, lashed it to his thigh, and made him walk on it even though it hurt so badly he blacked out—

But that was before. 

Before, when his thoughts were murkier, simpler, hungrier. When he was still more animal than monster. This is now, with him sprawled on the floor, and the guards who are barking at him to get up, and he's laughing at them because they're barking, and isn't that just _so goddamn funny?_

"Fuck you," he tells them, laughing despite laying naked and shaking on the cold, scarred, concrete floor, which is a mirror of him. 

Isn't it? 

It is. 

A mirror that doesn't reflect him as he was but reflects what they've done to him instead. He is cold, and scarred, which is only one letter off from _scared,_ and he's been scared for so long. Alone for so long too, which is only two letters off from _long,_ and he doesn't know how long he's been down here.

He remembers, belatedly, that most of the guards don't know more than a handful of Amestrian words, so these stony fucks probably don't know what he said. So he says it again, this time in a language they can understand. Their language. The language he used to think was beautiful. The language he used to delight in speaking. 

_"Va te faire foutre,"_ he says, laughing harder, laughing even as they hit him as they've hit him a thousand times before. But it's fine. It is. It's fine, because they only hit him on his arms and his legs—the leg that's always been his and the leg that isn't his but is still a sore, aching, screaming thing that's attached to him—and he can't feel anything where they hit him, except where he does.

The point was—

He had a point.

Really, he did. He was going somewhere with this.

The guards ignore him, his laughter and his resistance, and haul him to his feet—the foot that belongs to him and the foot that was forced upon him. A knife of fire lances from heel to groin as he tries to use the _fucking_ leg they gave him and he screams again, and he's laughing even still. 

God.

God.

This won't ever end, will it? This is it. _This is it._ This is how it's going to be for the rest of his goddamn life, and he doesn't even have a say in how long _that_ will be anymore, does he? It's just _—_

_—this._

Hard-handed guards and hard-eyed scientists and him, cold and scarred and scared and naked, naked but for the heavy chains that leave his wrists and throat and ankles—even the ankle that wasn't his originally—raw and bloodied. He's so tired of darkness, and loneliness, and the screams that ring down the cold concrete halls. He's tired of asking why and being hit for speaking out of turn and being hit for not answering their demands and—

—and—

—and he was going somewhere with this.

He's going somewhere now. Somewhere new. 

Oh, god. The guards are taking him somewhere new.

"Please," he whispers, or he shouts, or he only thinks it and that's why the guards don't say anything or hit him with their rough hands. They just keep dragging him along on his hind legs—his two legs—the legs that aren't his because he should only have the one he can feel things with and the other should be _metal,_ but it's gone now, and he can only feel _fire_ with the one they gave him. 

It doesn't make any sense. He can't make any sense of it. His brain is addled. Out of sorts. His brain keeps telling him to fall down and walk on all fours, because that's how it should be, shouldn't it? Shouldn't he walk on all fours?

He falls down again, clumsy and stumbling. His jaw blooms with fresh pain. There's blood in his mouth, hot and pus-bitter, dripping down his chin as he slurs, “ _S'il te plaît. Je n'en veux pas._ Please. _Arrêtez. Laissez-moi tranquille._ Leave me alone. Stop. _Arrêtez. S'il te plaît._ ”

The guards bark, and they hit him, and they haul him to his feet, and they drag him at last to a cavernous room dotted all over with harsh white lights that do little to chase away the dark gathered in the far-off corners. The lights are all clustered together, highlighting a circular pit in the floor covered with heavy crisscrossing metal beams. A new cage to put him in. A bigger one. Why?

He breathes deep and smells iron. 

Blood. 

Old blood, settling heavy and clotted on his tongue and in his nose. He gags, choking. The guards don't care. They just keep dragging him along—alone—to the pit. He fights them, but he's been fighting them the whole way here and has only managed to wear himself out for nothing. 

He fights for nothing. 

One of the guards lets him go long enough to open up a section in the cage, and the other guard pushes him in.

He falls down.

Again.

Farther than before, and before that, and before that too. 

It's a long way down.

He lands in a painful heap of his own limbs and something hard and sharp that crunches and breaks apart into pieces that dig deep into his ribs and spine and every inch of his cold, scarred skin. He snarls pain and it comes out too low, the pitch and the echo and the hum of it all wrong, wrong, _wrong._ An inhuman sound, rumbling in his chest and oozing out between his sharp teeth. He breathes in to make that sound again, louder and angrier so the guards above are _sure_ to know how he feels about this latest development, but it's all harsh white lights above him so he can't even see if they're watching him and anyway the smell is so much _stronger_ down here. 

He chokes again. He chokes on old, crusted blood; soft meats gone rotten, soft and shapeless; firm muscle gone rotten too, stiff and shrunken; old bones too.

That's what he's in. He's—

He's in—

Oh, _god._

Fuck, no, nonono, _no—_

This pit. This hole in a hole in a hole, darkness realized, is full of dead and broken and rotting things. He's _covered_ in it. Covered in old gore, covered in old wolves and birds and bears who weren't any of those things, not really, not for real—

—this isn't real, it can't be real, it can't be happening, please, put him back, take him out, he's sorry, please stop, _s'il te plaît—_

—he's sinking to his elbows and knees—knee that was always his and the knee forced upon him—

—these were _people,_ they were people like him, and they all used to be people and now they're dead and—

—and is he next?

Seriously? 

_Seriously?_

Is this all there is? Is this all it comes to? All this pain, this suffering, this madness? Is _this_ all it amounts to? _Why?_ Fuck. Fuck, _please,_ he doesn't want this, he doesn't want to die, not here, not down here, he doesn't remember why it matters anymore, he doesn't remember what _before_ was like, but he doesn't want to die. He just doesn't, okay? Please, please, not like this, let him out, let him go, oh god, _s'il te plaît—_

_“Ta gueule.”_

He flinches, sinking low into the offal, which sounds a lot like _awful,_ but not in the language this strange new person that smells like him but not is speaking. She smells all wrong, sharp and ticking, like hot metal and ammonia, he _knows_ this smell, it's what he's smelled like ever since that _bitch—_

"You talk too much," the voice of the person who does and doesn't smell like him says. Amestrian. She's speaking Amestrian at him. _His_ language. 

He lifts his head from the gore and stares into the white-black dark until a person-shape becomes clear. It—

—she? 

Yes, definitely she. She smells like him but _not_ like him too, and somehow by smell alone he _knows_ that she is a she and that's older than him, and stronger too. He drops his gaze because half his mangled brain is screaming at him to show deference, but he drags his gaze back up again because _fuck_ that, so he settles somewhere near her paws—

—fuck, no, _fuck,_ her hands, her feet, _pay attention—_

—as a compromise.

"Amestrian?"

It takes him a moment—moments, minutes, something—to realize that was a question she wants an answer to. He swallows. Coughs. Swallows again. "Y-yeah. _Ouais. Je suis un amestrien.”_

She barks laughter at him, unimpressed. "Your accent is terrible," she says, which is funny, because _terrible_ is spelled the same in both their languages but she says it like she's speaking Cretan. She rolls her Rs. She trills instead of growls. It makes her sound more human than she is.

He barks laughter too. "So's yours."

Her teeth are very long and very sharp when she bares them at him in a wide, flirtatious grin. "This is your first time here?"

She's speaking his language, so it's only courtesy he return the favor. Equivalent exchange. What a goddamn joke. _“Oui. Quel est cet endroit?”_

"What does it look like?" She snorts irritably. _"Non._ Smell. What does it _smell_ like?"

He sniffs again. Chokes again. _"Mort."_

_"Oui._ I will die, or you will die."

_“P-pourquoi?”_

She barks laughter again, bitter and weary. She sounds so, so tired. "Because they want it. It is a test." 

Her teeth grow longer and sharper still. He smells the beast swarm out of her; hears the pop and groan of her bones, the creak of her tendons, the growl in her throat and stomach. She's a wolf like he's a wolf, which is the same thing as saying neither of them are wolves at all, but neither are they the humans they used to be.

His teeth itch. He swallows again, pretending as hard as he can that he can't feel his own jaw shift and creak. _“Quel test?”_

She coughs disdain, pointing her snout to the bars high, high above their heads. "I don't know how to say in Amestrian. _Le sifflet."_

He frowns. Does he know that word? Did he? Did he ever? His head's full of white spaces and white grins on white faces; a thing that is a god he doesn't believe in but knows is there regardless. That place is long ago and far away and out of reach for far too long now. That place once filled his years with nightmares and grief. Now his nightmares are bleak and stifling in a way that makes him _yearn_ for that place—darkness and gnawing cold, clawed concrete and biting metal shackles, his skin splitting open to let the monster they made him come out to play on command—

—or, that's what he's heard from others in the block his cell is in, at least, amid the growls and weeping of the other beasts that aren't beasts, not really. Forced to do the unspeakable. A test they passed, for all that they wished they hadn't—

"Oh," he says.

"You understand?"

_“Non. Oui. Oui. Je comprends 'un test.'”_

She nods her long, long snout. "It is a test, yes. One of us will die. They make us kill."

_“Comment?”_

"I said. _Le sifflet."_

He shakes his head, grinds his teeth that refuse to stay flat and human. _“Je ne comprends pas.”_

She sighs. "You understand soon. This is my, mm. Fourth time. Second time, it did not work. I stayed here. Third time it worked, so I killed. But still I am here. _They_ leave me here because it did not work once. Now here we are, you and I. My fourth time. Maybe it works again? Maybe I kill you too. Maybe you kill me instead. Maybe that's better. I don't know. I'm tired. My life is finished, over. It is finished. I am just _this_ now. This beast that they made of me. I am what they made me, and I know this is not what I want and that I cannot fix this. So, now I want to die. _This_ is what I know."

She hasn't changed all the way yet. If she had, she wouldn't be speaking. She wouldn't be _capable_ of speech, if she'd changed completely. That's how it is for him, anyway. He swallows again, and in Amestrian says, "I don't want to kill you."

She barks laughter again, harsh and hoarse. "What you want does not matter. What I want does not matter. It is only what _they_ want that matters." She nods again at the ring of harsh white lights above them, a halo, an array that they have been made the focal point of, an array that will act upon them soon.

He tastes blood on his tongue, slick across teeth that are too long, too sharp. Cutting his gums, his lips. His jaw aches. His head pounds. He doesn't know what to do with his fingers, sunk deep into the ripped open remains of someone else's rib cage, in the soft and reeking scraps of lung tissue left to rot down here in the dark.

No.

Not fingers.

He doesn't _have_ proper fingers anymore—

—not ever?

Maybe he used to have fingers but right now he's got paws, stiff and braced to hold his growing, shifting, creaking weight. Claws digging deeper into the rotten meat, drawing out a muskier reek. Maggots squirm between the rough pads where he should have—once had—fingertips and palms. It should disgust him. His empty, empty stomach growls instead. He growls too.

"Who were you?" The she who is not a wolf or a woman asks in the same thick accent as the guards and scientists and alchemists of this hellhole. How did he ever think it was a pretty thing to listen to? 

She stands on all fours, hunchbacked and half-made. Half-undone. Fur spills down her back, frames her gaunt face, hides her hanging breasts in shadow. Not fur. A mane? No, a mane is fur too. What's the word? What's the _word?_ He has it too, the same long fur tickling his ears that are still too round and dull and hairless—

Hair. _That's_ the word he's looking for.

She has hair, the same as him because they're people, or they used to be—human. They both used to be human. She's blonde too, matted with old blood. Old kills. She's killed others. She told him she had. _She's_ the one responsible for the mess he's standing on all fours in.

"I asked a question," she growls. "Your name. What was it? Who were you, before this? Who were you, when you were still a man?"

_“Qu'importe?”_ He yowls, yells, yelps—some word with a strong _yeh_ sort of sound to the start of it. His voice drops low and cracks high; it should be a ridiculous, _goofy_ sound he made, but the base of his spine has just wriggled its way out of his skin and he's busy trying to figure out how much _that_ hurt to care. Compared to old hurts, what's something so small as a tail? 

The hunched, gargoyle thing that used to be a person just like he used to be a person says, "My name was Renée Poirier. I was a soldier. I served my country. I was proud. Now I am a beast. Now I am tired. I give my name to you. It is yours to keep. I think I will die here, I think you will kill me—"

_“NO!”_

Her ears, long and straight, flick back in surprise. "No?"

"I won't! _Je ne veux pas!"_

Laughter drips from between her fangs. "You say this, as if there is still a choice. Tell me, Amestrian, what was your name?"

He _really_ hates how she keeps asking that in the past tense, like she's so sure he's got no attachments left to the man he was before he was made a chimera. How can she be so sure? He hasn't been sure of anything since he was dragged down into this place. He hasn't been sure of anything since….

He doesn't know how long he's been down here. He doesn't even have the small certainty of time left to him, anymore. Time has become so strange, so distant, down here in the dark. 

Hair that is fur bristles and itches down his cold, scarred skin. He'll be warm again soon.

He swallows. May as well indulge her, right? "Edward. Elric-Rockbell."

She hums, or she whines, or she growls. Whatever it is, it's a pleased sound. She is made content by the gift of his name. _“Enchantée.”_

If she's going to speak her language then he doesn't see why he shouldn't speak his own too, at least while he's still capable of it. Control is a slippery, squirming thing. He can't keep a grip on it no matter how hard he squeezes. "I'm not gonna kill you. I wouldn't. I'd never. I'm not that kind of—"

"Kind of what? _Man?"_ She barks again, a bright shock of sound that echoes off the clawed and bloodied concrete. His ears ring. _“Vous n'êtes pas un homme, Monsieur_ Elric-Rockbell. You are _not._ You are a beast, and _they_ make beasts do whatever _they_ want."

Scathing. Matter-of-fact. This isn't madness speaking. There is no fervor, no fear. She _knows._ "H-how?"

"Five times they will bring you here. Five times they will, mm. Make you mad. Insane. Five times you will kill." She rolls her broad shoulders, dismissive. "Or maybe you are lucky? Maybe it will not work even once on you. Maybe I kill you instead, and it will be the next beast they bring here that will kill me."

Fuck. What the hell is she talking about? How can she be so—flippant? About _murder?_ Like it's a coin toss, something left entirely out of their paws—

_—fuck—_

—hands. Out of their hands. It can't be out of their hands.

Can it?

He shakes his head, feeling off balance by a face grown too long in the snout. "No—"

"This is the way it is." She says it like an apology. Like she's honestly sorry that she might kill him. "Ah, do you hear?"

He does. Heavy boot stomping above and around the ring of harsh light, low voices speaking Cretan. They rattle on to each other, abominably clinical. They should be talking about simple life forms in tiny petri dishes, not people.

_Ready to record,_ one says. 

_Keep a close eye on the male's left hindquarter,_ another says.

_Bet you a smoke he won't do anything,_ a third says.

_Sure he will. He'll do what any Amestrian dog's good for—roll over!_

The lot of them cackle amongst themselves. They sound like any group of coworkers, cracking jokes to kill a little time. They sound bored, and normal, and completely disparate from the cold gray hell Ed's life has been whittled down to. 

There's a whine building in his throat the longer he listens, cutting itself open on his long, strong fangs. He understands. His mind, brain, soul, and body are all tangled up and aching and distorted—he's certain he wouldn't recognize himself in a mirror if they put him in front of one—but he understands.

_Proceed with the test,_ a voice high above says.

_“S'il te plaît,”_ he begs the guards high above and out of sight. There's no answer. Of course there isn't. When have they ever listened to him? When has there every been one worthwhile fucking thing any of them have ever—

A _scream_ of noise pierces the air; high and shrill and terrible. It mutilates his train of thought and cuts him as deeply as a scalpel even as he falls down again to cover his ears with bloody paws. His scream joins the noise, is wrenched out of him by the noise, matches neatly with the noise octaves lower, and then lower still as the change is drawn out of him fully. His meager control is shredded, torn from him. He slides away from and out of and behind himself. The scrap of self called Ed is set aside, shelved, buried by new agony and a fresh swell of frothing, burning _hate_ and _hunger_ that are one and the same and he _must_ act, he _must_ move, he must _bite,_ he's so _hungry,_ he's _cornered,_ the she is an enemy and _the she must DIE—_

"Ah," the she sighs, laying down to bare her neck to his fangs. _"Merci."_

_Merci,_ he thinks, is one letter and one language away from _mercy,_ and that means something, it used to mean something, it should mean something to him still—

But that is the last clear thought the thing that was once Ed has for a long, long time.

* * *

Ed wakes up.

He's been squeezed back down into the human-adjacent shape the bio-alchemists designed for him, clumsy and long-limbed and familiar in the same uneasy way of déjà vu. He's been returned to his cage, weighed down once again by unnecessary shackles. Cold metal bruises his shoulder, his ribs, his hip, his knee. Cold metal numbs his fingers, all ten of them. The five he's always had and the five he gave up for his brother that his brother then gave back. Cold metal numbs his toes too, all ten of them. The five that have always been his and the five that are reluctantly his now. Cold metal gnaws his wrists, his ankles, his throat. Cold metal bars of a cold metal cage that is _his_ only because he's spent so long locked up inside it that it's the closest thing to refuge he has in this place. This cage is his miserable oasis. They so very rarely do anything to him when he's locked up inside it. There's nothing and no one here now. Only him. 

Only him and his own whirring, blurring, inside-out screaming thoughts to bite him.

Her name was Renée Poirier. She had been a Cretan. She had been a soldier. She had been a _person._ They'd taken her humanity from her, but she had still been at least that much.

And now she's nothing. Nothing but past tense.

He breathes too deeply. His stomach hurts, churns, burns. He rolls onto his hands and knees, and the left one screams protest when he puts too much weight on it. He gasps pain, and the gasp becomes a gag that has him lunging for the bars so he can aim his sick out onto the clawed concrete. Red and pink slippery mush splatters loudly, a mess of steaming gore. He remembers the way it had tasted going down—

—hot and raw and _fresh—_

—and retches again.

He's shaking when he finally stops. The bars swim before his eyes so he shuts them, presses his forehead to the cold metal, groans relief. He's burning up. He's _been_ burning up. 

He sinks down, curling up as much as his chains allow. His skin is hot and dry, itching terribly, flaking all over with blood that isn't his. He's still shaking. He _was_ cold, wasn't he? Before? Whenever that was, however long ago that was, before they'd thrown him down into a pit full of dead and mutilated chimera, where she'd been left to die—

He bares his teeth and high, hoarse laughter leaks out of him. _Left to die?_ No, no. She was deemed a failure, left _wanting,_ left to _wait,_ murdered by _him._ He killed her. He tore out her throat with his teeth and then _he ate her—_

His gorge rises again; stomach cramping, breath choking. He slaps his paws _—_

_—hands,_ goddamn it, he's got hands—

—over his mouth. There's nothing left. He really will get sick if he forces himself to puke any more. Just—

—breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Spittle dribbles against his hand. Tears drip off his nose. He holds back whatever awful sound is pressing urgently against his clenched teeth, convinced it would be a howl.

He killed her.

They _made_ him do it.

The made him—

—fucking—

—kill her. They made him kill her. They made him _eat her—_

He remembers, is the thing.

He _remembers._

He went fucking—

—rabid? Insane? Who the fuck knows what. They blew a goddamn _whistle_ and the last scrap of his humanity fled for the hills with its tail between its legs. His brain handed the reins of his body over to the _thing_ that they'd made of him, just like that. Just like she said would happen. 

But why does he _remember_ it? Why does he have to remember the tension and spasm of her throat between his teeth? Why does he have to remember the hot spurt of her blood, her last choking breath—

_He killed her, he ate her, he killed her, he ate her, he killed her, he ate her—_

Over and over and over again, the truth of what he's done runs ragged circles through his head. Two irrefutable facts he can't hide from. He's got the smell of her half-digested meat curdling a foot from his snout—

_—nose,_ fuck—

—and her blood smeared all over his skin. His mouth hurts behind the tight press of his hands. They made him kill her and he has no idea how they did it. The she said _—_

_—no,_ goddamn it _—_

_—Renée_ said that they would make him do _this_ again.

Five times.

She said they'd make him do—

_—that—_

—five times. 

He killed her because of that whistle _—_

_—le sifflet,_ and isn't he pleased to have learned something new down in this hell—

—and if what she said is true they're going to drag him down into that pit four more times. They're going to make him kill four more people. 

Or, if her jilted Amestrian conjecture is anything to go by, there's a chance that whistle _won't_ set him off and he'll end up the same way as Renée Poirier. The next time he hears that _fucking_ whistle some other poor fucker could be the one to go rabid and kill and _eat_ him instead.

Laughter seeps out between his fingers despite his best efforts, high and barking and brittle, so he gives up trying to stop it and covers his ears instead so he won't have to hear himself howl. 

He doesn't understand. What's the point? What is the fucking _point_ of this? Is this all that's left to him? A fucking coin toss he's got no say in? 

He thought—

—he used to think—

—that he could endure this. All of this. Anything these fucks could think to throw at him. He'd wait it out. Ride it out. Grit his teeth and hold steady—

—hold _strong—_

—through the very worst they could throw at him. Once he accepted that _escape_ was impossible he thought he could _survive_ long enough for the cavalry to come charging in to save the day. 

Surely, they're out there now, looking for him. Surely everyone from the Fuhrer down to the newest private assigned out West knows he's missing and is doing their utmost to track him down. What's the point of fame if it can't be put to good use when you've been squirreled away as a goddamn test subject? If he was still high profile enough for Creta to sink their teeth into a decade after he quit the military, then surely Amestris' brass will care enough to hunt him down again. If Creta wanted to catch him so badly, surely Amestris will want him back?

He's certain his friends in the military would raise merry hell to find him. Tear the West region part, and Milos too, track down his last sighting and trace the Cretan railways as far as south as they've taken him. It will take time to find him, but they will. Of that much he's certain. He's sure of it, and of course someone will have sent a message to Xing by now. Al will tear Creta's mountain ranges down to _gravel_ in order to find him, and Mei would sense the ugly tangle of horror and pain the qi here must be, and together they're guaranteed to find him, and then—

_—he killed her he ate her he killed her he ate her he killed her he ate her—_

—and then.

And then he'll have to look them all in the eye and tell them exactly what he's done.

He's shaking again. Did he ever stop? His hand is still over his mouth. He can't tell if he's bitten himself again; if he'll see a smear of inhuman, iridescent blood and saliva on his paw—

_—palm,_ fuck, why it so hard to remember that?

His other hand is pressed to his side, fingers sunk into the divots between his ribs. His softness sapped away in the mysterious amount of time he's been down here; all that's left is a thing of stringy muscle and too-dense bone. He's off-balance any time he tries to stand up because his brain can't figure out how many legs he's got, and isn't that just _so goddamn funny?_

He remembers a riddle from a story he read as a kid, in the hard year after their failed attempt at human transmutation.

(white space, white face, _congratulations, you've won,_ what a fucking _joke)_

The hero of the story approached a sphinx—

—a chimera in her own right, a woman's head on a lion's body, and he wonders if he could figure out how to do the same and laughter peals out of him—

The hero of the story approached a sphinx, right, and she told him he had to answer her riddle correctly, otherwise she'd kill him right there where he stood—

_—he killed her he ate her he killed her he ate her he killed her he ate her,_ they're going to make him do it again and there is _nothing_ he can do to stop it—

—well, no, there's one avenue left to him. He could do what Renée Poirier did. He could lay down in the gore of that round pit, bare his throat and beg _mercy, merci—_

—no.

No, he can't. He _can't._

He wants to see his family again, and his friends too. He wants to see the sun, the stars, green grass waving in a stiff wind. He wants to see wheat fields and mountains and cobblestone streets, the half-constructed branch of Central's National Library that Mustang keeps threatening to name after him. He wants leather bound books and chalk dust, freshly made coffee and cheap perfume and coal smoke. He wants bookstores and greasy hole in the wall diners, cats sleeping in windows, rickety iron chairs outside corner cafes, summer storms, the harm-hued interior of a passenger car, his own _bed,_ jazz music on the radio, an Amestrian newspaper without a single bad thing printed in it. He wants a thousand little things beyond these cold concrete walls and biting steel bars and red meat tearing, dripping, tasting so fresh, so good—

_—fuck—_

—the sphinx.

The sphinx.

The sphinx asked, "What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?" And he knows what the riddle's answer is, he remembers it, but he also knows now that the story was wrong. It isn't _man._ Or, well, it can be, but that's only one side of the coin because _here he is._

He's living proof that _chimera_ can answer the riddle just as well.

They're going to make him kill someone else. Renée Poirier warned him, before he—

_—killed her ate her killed her ate her killed her ate her—_

It's just a matter of time, and he can't. He _can't._

He doesn't want to.

Please.

Someone. Anyone. Help him, please.

He can't stop this on his own. He can't stop _himself._ He _can't._

He's going to kill someone, or he'll be killed, and he'll never see another sunrise. He'll never hug Winry again, or hold his kids, or make another trip out to Xing. He's never going to see Al or Emperor Fancypants or Lan Fan or Mei, or even circle back out to Resembool to take the kids to see Granny again. That old goat really is going to outlive him, and isn't that just the funniest goddamn thing?

Ed buries his head in his good shoulder and tries to do anything but think.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the spirit of the Good Intentions WIP Fest, here's the rest of this AU that I didn't include earlier because it's a bit more of a hot mess. The only editing for this bit was cleaning up some formatting and grammar, so you can see the frankly huge difference in pacing. The quick and dirty NaNo angle gave the original run of things a far more rambling, run-on sentence panic as opposed to the jerky, discordant, off-kilter panic I went with cleaning up the earlier stuff. Still, there's some interesting things in it that I like pieces of and I thought some folks out there might like to see a bit more of this AU.
> 
> (Further apologies for shitty Google Translate French.)

A guard comes by with a bowl of mush, barks something at him but he doesn’t care, he refuses to care. The guard leaves. He doesn’t look at the bowl even though his stomach is a knot of nausea and hunger and he’s so fucking thirsty, he just wants a glass of water but he can’t remember the last time they gave him anything to drink.

The guard comes back with another guard, no, two more guards from the smell. They’re laughing. Oh, good, great, this’ll be fun. Can’t they just, fuck, give him a day or whatever amounts to a day down here? He’s tired, he’s so tired. He’s digesting the parts of Renée Poirier he didn’t throw up. Just stop, go away, let him rest.

One of the guards bangs on the top of his cage and they all laugh when he flinches. Another one must bend down because his rough voice is too close to the bars when he asks, _“Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas, loup garou? Vous sentez-vous malade?”_

He bares his teeth. _Loup garou_. Wolfman. They think they’re so goddamn funny.

They ask him again if he’s feeling sick, bang on his cage, ask him if he’s just feeling down, aw, poor wolfman, poor stupid Amestrian dog, is he sad? They heard him and the bitch chatting, does he miss his new friend? Well he shouldn’t have gone and killed her, eh? God, but the mess he made of her, makes a normal man sick it does! Like he enjoyed it—

“Shut up,” he snarls, or he means to say it in Amestrian but it comes out as nothing but a warning rumble deep in his chest. His teeth are too big again, too long, too sharp. How did Heinkel deal with this shit? How did any of them? They’d all always seemed so—controlled. Calm, cool, collected, whatever the fuck, the guards are banging on his cage more and it’s hard to think, harder than usual, what’s even fucking usual anymore. 

He curls up tighter, tries to calm down. _Normal man,_ he thinks scathingly. Fuck off with that. The guards are all bargain bin chimeras too. They look human, sure, mostly, but their eyes shine wrong and their teeth are too sharp. Little tells that used to raise the hair on the back of his neck when he was still human. Now he knows better. Now he knows the guards were all changed as a precaution, otherwise one wrong move and any one of the prisoners could take a bite out of them. Even the playing field.

He can’t deny he wouldn’t be tempted to, if it were an option. He can’t deny he’s tempted to bite one of them anyway, never mind the hell they’d give him after. He has no idea if it’s something he would have thought of when he was human or if this is that fucking animal instinct Darius always loved to harp on about. He doesn’t know which is worse or which is more comforting. He just wants the guards to leave. They’re clearly not taking him anywhere, otherwise they wouldn't have started messing with his shackles, choking him, yanking on his bad leg, shit like that. They’re just here for a laugh. There’s nothing more obnoxious than guards with time to kill until their shift’s over.

One of them declares that the reason he made a mess all over the floor must be that he doesn’t _know_. The other two are astounded, my god, surely he must? Surely the Amestrian dog’s not so stupid as that? Wasn’t this one supposed to be _smart_ , isn’t that why the brass wanted him so bad? How could he not notice something so obvious? Not used to good cooking, one of them suggests, and they all howl with laughter and start to rag on bland Amestrian cuisine for a minute, which, whatever, they can do whatever the fuck they want so long as they leave him out of it. 

Of course they don’t though. One of them pulls on one of his chains and he snarls, snarls louder when they pull harder. _“Regarde moi,”_ the guard snarls back. 

They all know he understands them. His mistake. He should have realized the advantage he’d have if they thought he couldn’t string more than a _where’s the bathroom_ together. Ah well. If wishes were horses, they'd end up as chimeras down here too. He doesn’t roll over—they’ve all driven _that_ joke into the ground—just cranes his head over his sore right shoulder and bares his teeth up at them. He’s pretty sure that’s something he would have done as a human. It’s a mean comfort.

The nearest guard’s fangs dimple his lips when he smiles. He’s got old scars across his jaw and one cheek, like claw marks. Now there’s a fucking idea. The guard asks him if he’s stupid and barks laughter. 

“Stupid enough to get caught by you, I s’pose,” he says in Amestrian, because he doubts they can string even a _where’s the bathroom_ together in his language. Either he’s wrong or they just don’t like his tone, because the guard yanks on his chain again. They’ve got him by the right arm and his shoulder throbs and threatens to pop out of the joint again. _Fuck_ them, _fuck_ the bastard who cut out his prosthetic clavicle, _fuck_ the alchemists for not giving him a new one along with the leg they gave him, not like he wanted it but—fuck, _fuck—_

The guards laugh raucously above him. Fuck them. Fuck. Fuck. Ow.

_“Regarde moi,”_ the guard says again, rattling the chain a little. Not enough to hurt, just enough to remind him who’s in charge. Ha. Like they ever give him a chance to forget. 

He glowers up at him and the guard asks if he really doesn’t know. _“Sais quoi?”_ He grits out, exasperated. Just spit out whatever bullshit and leave him alone.

The other two guards are grinning too. The one on the left grins wolfishly, open mouthed with his too-thin tongue lolling. Must be the one not talking as much. 

The nearest guard yanks on his chain again and asks him what he thinks he’s been eating the whole time. He looks at him, baffled. What the hell did that—

Quicker than he can react the guard sticks his hand through the food slot and upends the bowl of mush in his face. He yelps, splutters, room temperature broth and soft meat clumps and cold potatoes and stringy gray vegetables spilling in his eyes and soaking his hair. He can’t see well enough to dodge the guard’s rough fingers, shoving something—meat, definitely meat—into his mouth. He bites down but the guard’s quicker; he only bites the meat, feels no satisfying—horrifying—crunch of bone. He swallows so he can snarl, but the guards all laugh and the nearest one says, _“Tu as mangé du la chimère.”_

He stares. They’re making even less sense than usual, and that’s saying something. He knows he fucking ate a chimera, he knows, he knows, he _knows_. Her name was Renée Poirier and she was a wolf like he’s a wolf, which is to say they aren’t wolves at all but they’re not human anymore either, and she’s not anything but past fucking tense because he killed her and ate her, and he killed her and ate her because the alchemists did—something—to him that made him want to kill and eat her. So what is this guard playing at?

_“Je le sais,”_ he says, wary, flinching when the guards all laugh again.

_“Non, non,”_ the other guard says, the one who doesn’t laugh like a dog. “Now.”

He shakes his head, not understanding—

—but he does. 

The lumps of meat on his chest, on the floor of his cage, in his stomach—they came from another chimera. Someone like him. A person. They’re feeding him _people_ , they have been the whole time and he never knew, he never knew all this time he’s been eating—he’s been _cannibalizing—_

“No,” he whispers. “No. You’re lying—"

“Not a lie,” the second guard says, grinning crookedly. “All eat the same. Always.”

The guards bark laughter one last time and then finally, they leave. 

He shies away from the clumps of meat cooling in his cell, curls up tightly in as close to a corner as his chains allow. No, he _thinks—begs_. No. They’re lying. All this time, trapped down here in this freezing hell, weeks or months, his life sustained day after day by the other—no. No. It’s wrong. They’re lying. They have to be. Just another ugly trick. Please.

Time passes. The mush caught in his tangled hair cools and clots. Nothing fresh is brought, no one comes to bother him at all. He doesn’t eat no matter how much his stomach growls. They lied. He _knows_ it’s a lie—but what if it’s not? What then? He gets so hungry. He’s so tired. But he can’t. He can’t eat. Someone will come for him. They have to find him. Soon. Please. _S'il te plaît._ They’re wrong. They lied. Please.

* * *

He hears the bitch before he smells her, and he smells her before he sees her standing in the open doorway of the narrow little room his cage is kept. He growls and doesn’t mind the purely animal sound that bubbles out of him. _She’s_ the one who made him _this_. It’s _her_ bite on his leg that made him _this_. 

The bitch sighs. “The guards say you are not eating.”

He growls louder, deeper, rolls onto his hands and knees—grinds his fangs together to keep his pained yelp unuttered when his left knee hits the cold metal too hard—and glares a challenge at her. He sets the scrap of humanity left to him aside, folds it up small and hides it away where she can’t set her teeth to it. She doesn’t deserve to see it when she’s the one who did _this_ to him.

“You need to eat,” she says. Yeah, she would say that. Pretending like she cares about his well-being when _she’s_ the one who tore him open to allow his humanity to bleed out. Look at him, he growls. Fucking look at this hobbled, toothsome _thing_ he’s been reduced to. It’s all that’s left of the man he was, and it’s all. Her. Fault. Fuck her. She’s _proud_ of what she did to him. Never said it plainly but he can _smell_ it on her. Pride in a job well done. What a bitch.

“Fine,” she says. “Don’t eat. I don’t care. Die and be done with it.”

He cackles, high and shrill. “Yeah? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

She bares her teeth—too long, too sharp—in a humorless grin. “I would. My superiors would not, however. They have high hopes for you, Fullmetal.”

“That’s not my fucking name.”

“What horrid language. You never fail to disappoint.”

His skull grew faster than the rest of his face so he can’t really grin back, but whatever face he’s managing to make at her is a nasty thing if her own expression’s anything to go by. Then again she always has this look about her like she just stepped in dogshit. Maybe that’s just how the other alchemists put her back together, he doesn’t know. 

The bitch takes her left hand out of the pocket of her white coat. She’s got a syringe full of something clear, something slightly tinted green. He’s seen it twice before, but both times he was more animal than person, more eager to bite than to ask questions. This is the first time he’s been sane enough to wonder what the fuck it is.

“You need this,” she says. “You will die without it.”

He laughs, loud and barking, pitching higher into a howl that sets off the other wolves that aren’t wolves on this floor. He hears their manic fear mirroring his own and finds relief in it. He’s not the only one down here like this, this half-thing, this twisted up monster, this chimera full of teeth and fury hungry for the excuse to bite. He grins wolfishly, slitted eyes and bared fangs. “Fuck you,” he says, and finds gladness in the unhappy curl of her mouth.

“You’ll eat,” she says, brandishing the bowl of mush in her other hand that may or may not be chopped up people-chimera. “You’ll take this,” she says, brandishing the syringe so it catches the light spilling in from the hall. “ You’ll accept both or you’ll die.”

“Fuck you,” he says again. “Go take a flying fuck over the goddamn moon.”

Her snout—nose, she’s got a nose, she still looks human enough for a nose, she’s got better control than she does and fuck her for that too—wrinkles. She walks into the room and he snarls louder, feels hackles rise all down his spine, feels his bones creak and muscles strain. He doesn’t want to change but he fucking hates her enough to make the pain worth it. She closes the gap anyway, cold and confident and just out of reach of his paws—claws—whatever. She slides the bowl of mush over, just outside the narrow gap in the bars of his cage. She holds up the syringe, twists it between her fingers. Her fingernails—no, sharp enough to be called claws—tick and tap carefully against the glass.

“I mean it,” she says. “You need this. Every six days, the same as me. Seven days, you’ll start to go insane, almost as much as you did in the pit—” He flinches. She grins. Bitch. “Eight days, your body will start to tear itself apart. The shape you’re in? You won’t live nine days. This is not a threat. It’s fact.”

“Yeah?” Hard to talk with how long his teeth have gotten, how long his snout’s grown. He growls low and knows she’ll understand him. There’s a fine line between personhood and the monster she made him, and monsters can all understand each other just fine. “And I’m supposed to believe you?”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” she replies. “They’ll show you the truth of this, if you survive the pit.” 

He flinches. She grins. 

She pulls something out of the other pocket of her coat, a thin wooden shape with curving pale carvings. “You take your dose, or I get a guard to come in here and blow this.”

He squints at the wooden shape until it makes sense. It’s a whistle.

_Le sifflet,_ the dark shape of the thing that used to be Renée Poirier whispers in his memory. His memory fractures, splintered by a high, thin scream of noise and pain that tore the scrap of his humanity, that last bit of him that can still call itself Edward Elric-Rockbell, out of the beast and left it to hang.

The bitch grins wider. 

He shakes his head, shrinking back until his spine is pressed painfully against the bars nearest the walls. “You’re lying.”

“Of course not,” she says. “The truth is far more useful.”

White grins in white spaces. Yeah. Isn’t it just.

“Tell me what’s in the syringe.”

“It’s necessary.”

“Fuck you. What’s in it? What’s it gonna do to me?”

She sighs impatiently. “Consider the fact that you are dying as we speak.”

**Author's Note:**

> ETA Oct '20: Fucked around with the French grammar again, betcha anything it's still a hot mess.
> 
> If you've gotten this far:
> 
> 1) bless u  
> 2) Get ye to the [INCREDIBLE analysis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24927676/chapters/60327244) Manalfedz did of this fic! I am flattered for ever and always. <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [Manfedzku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manfedzku/pseuds/Manfedzku) Log in to view. 




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